Attributable to Darren Douglass, Health New Zealand Acting Chief Information Technology Officer - Digital Services:

At Health New Zealand we take the stability of our critical technology systems seriously and we recognise the role they play in directly supporting patient care.

There is no link between IT outages in recent weeks and staffing numbers in the Digital Services team at Health New Zealand.

All but one of the outages this month have been due to third party vendor issues.

We operate a very complex technology environment, and we have monitoring and support in place across the system.

We do experience technical issues from time to time. This includes the recent IT outages where thanks to strong back-up plans, patient care continued safely.

Since we became a single health organisation, we have been working hard to rationalise and modernise our systems, improve the quality of our data and digital platforms and ensure that they connect across the country to support and enhance healthcare delivery.

We have a 10-year plan Digital Investment Plan, announced in November and approved by Cabinet, to move to a modern, unified, and resilient digital health system.

While we continue to improve and modernise our technology environment patient safety remains our priority. Our hospitals have contingency plans in place to ensure the delivery of safe patient care during and IT outage.